Science Fiction Studies

#96 = Volume 32, Part 2 = July 2005

Mike Ashley and Robert A.W. Lowndes.The Gernsback Days: A Study of the Evolution of
Modern Science Fiction from 1911 to 1926.
Holicong, PA: Wildside, 2004
. 499 pp. $29.95 pbk

For those who briefly scan the beginnings of reviews without reading them in
their entireties, a few key points should immediately be conveyed about Mike
Ashley and Robert A. W. Lowndes’s The Gernsback Days. This book is an
invaluable compendium of information, absolutely essential reading for anyone
interested in studying the early development of the science fiction genre. It
is, and will likely remain, the definitive study of its subject. The facts that
its primary author lacks an academic background, and that the book is being
published by a print-on-demand company rather than a university press,
constitute powerful indictments of academic science fiction scholarship and its
sometimes questionable priorities.

This volume, however, should be more accurately described as two separate
books—one indispensable, the other superfluous—that might have been creatively
published in the dos-à-dos format of the old Ace doubles. One is Mike Ashley’s
The Gernsback Days, a project which, as described in Ashley’s
introduction, was originally completed in the early 1990s and endured long
delays with two projected publishers before finally finding a home with Wildside
Press. The other is Robert A. W. Lowndes’s Yesterday ‘s Worlds of Tomorrow,
an informal survey of stories in the science fiction magazines from 1926 to 1936
which, during the 1980s, became attached to Ashley’s project. (Also included is
a brief article by Charles D. Hornig, former editor of Gernsback ‘s Wonder
Stories, so one could even argue that the book has three authors.)

Lowndes’s book is less important for two reasons. First, as Ashley himself
acknowledges, the stories from the science fiction magazines that he selectively
discusses were subsequently much more thoroughly and authoritatively dealt with
in E.F. Bleiler and Richard Bleiler’s Science-Fiction: The Gernsback Years
(Kent, OH: Kent State UP, 1998). Still, some readers might maintain that
Lowndes’s approach, with its relative brevity and chronological, year-by-year
format, provides a better overview of early pulp science fiction than the
Bleilers’ format of grouping stories by authors, and Lowndes will also
occasionally glance at the science fiction being published in other magazines of
the era, like Weird Tales and Argosy, which the Bleilers exclude
from their survey.

But there is a second problem: I simply do not trust Lowndes’s judgments as I
did the Bleilers’. I am not confident that Lowndes is always choosing the best
or most significant stories to discuss, and I do not always find the way in
which he epitomizes each year’s trends in science fiction to be persuasive.
Granted, my knowledge of the material is far less extensive than that of the
Bleilers and Lowndes, since I have not examined every issue of every science
fiction magazine they describe, but when they do discuss stories and issues with
which I am familiar, I find myself usually agreeing with the Bleilers’ opinions
but less frequently agreeing with Lowndes’s opinions. In particular, I fear that
Lowndes is inclined to be overly generous in his evaluations, a disservice to
readers who are looking for the era’s few genuine masterpieces and who need
honest assessments of a story’s quality before they bother to seek it out.
Consider his description of Stanley G. Weinbaum’s “Valley of Dreams” (1934),
which Lowndes calls an “excellent continuation” (368) of Weinbaum’s earlier “A
Martian Odyssey” (1934). The Bleilers more accurately conclude that the story is
“Lacking the originality-interest of the first story” (482).

Ashley’s book commands more attention because it tells, in greater detail,
the story previously presented in Ashley’s The History of the Science Fiction
Magazines, Volume 1 (1974), decisively debunking the standard, simplified
accounts of Hugo Gernsback’s career and instead providing a fuller, more
nuanced, and exhaustively researched narrative. Gernsback’s involvement with
science fiction began with his own novel Ralph 124C 41+, serialized in
his practical science magazine Modern Electrics in 1911 and 1912; he then
primarily relied upon stories from other writers to serve as regular features in
Modern Electrics and his other science magazines. For the most part,
these were inconsequential vignettes about eccentric inventors and their
elaborately described inventions. Still, they were popular enough with readers
to inspire Gernsback to consider publishing an all-science fiction magazine. He
experimented with a special “Scientific Fiction” issue of his science magazine
Science and Invention in 1923, hesitated for a while, and finally
launched Amazing Stories in 1926.

Here, the story becomes more interesting: while Gernsback continued to prefer
stories that emphasized scientific explanations and detailed descriptions of
posited inventions, readers wanted to see more involving, action-packed fiction.
Gradually, Gernsback altered his preferences to match readers’ demands, writing
announcements, articles, and personal letters to writers that stressed the
importance of vivid characters and colorful adventure in science fiction. After
losing control of Amazing Stories due to bankruptcy in 1929, he was aided
in his efforts to improve the literary quality of science fiction by the first
managing editor of his new magazine Wonder Stories, David Lasser, who
energetically worked to achieve better stories before political disagreements
with Gernsback led to his unfortunate firing and replacement by a less talented
editor, the adolescent Charles D. Hornig. Gernsback attempted to carry on as the
Great Depression deepened, but increasingly intractable financial problems led
him to sell Wonder Stories in 1936 to concentrate on other, more profitable
enterprises. To support and enrich his story, Ashley includes extensive
quotations not only from Gernsback’s magazines but also from hitherto
undocumented promotional materials and personal correspondence. In addition to
Hornig’s reminiscences, appendices to the volume include detailed listings of
all science fiction stories and related articles published in Gernsback’s
magazines and a helpful “Selective Bibliography” of secondary resources.

Drawing upon all available records, Ashley proves beyond doubt that, despite
reports to the contrary, Gernsback in fact had an active interest in science
fiction throughout the years of his greatest influence. He also confronts, in a
balanced and well-documented manner, the major criticism directed at Gernsback:
that he was stingy and negligent in paying authors. Ashley acknowledges that
Gernsback freely spent money to enjoy the better things in life and that in the
1920s he invested too heavily in radio projects and the infant medium of
television, inevitably leading to grave financial problems. While discussing all
of the well-publicized complaints of certain writers, however, Ashley also shows
that some of his writers, at least some of the time, were in fact paid promptly
and paid reasonably well. The problem, Ashley concludes, is not that Gernsback
was penurious or conniving by nature, but that he consistently mismanaged his
own finances and was too stubborn to admit when he had made a mistake.

As one would expect in anything written by Ashley, the errors in The
Gernsback Days are rare and inconsequential. An early reference to Jules
Verne’s Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea gives its date of
publication as 1873 (30), when in fact this is the date of this 1870 book’s
first American translation (as the book itself later acknowledges). Ashley
provides the standard, and slightly inaccurate, version of Brian W. Aldiss’s
memorable comment in the 1961 “Introduction” to Penguin Science Fiction:
“science fiction is no more written for scientists than ghost stories are
written for ghosts” (45). What Aldiss actually wrote: “Science fiction—the fact
needs emphasizing—is no more written for scientists and technologists than ghost
stories were written for ghosts.” To state simply that Gernsback “arranged the
hardcover publication of his novel Ralph 124C 41+” (69) in 1925 is not
entirely accurate since, as I have documented elsewhere, Gernsback in fact
extensively revised and expanded the original 1911-1912 novel. And, inevitably,
there are scattered problems of proofreading, none meriting any attention.

When future scholars return to this era, they will undoubtedly seek to
re-interpret the birth and development of the science fiction genre—perhaps
fruitfully, because as I have suggested elsewhere, Ashley may not be the best
person to provide the big picture of the big subjects he tackles. But those
critics will always have to rely upon Ashley’s data—indefatigably ferreted out
and invariably presented with impeccable accuracy and clarity. Along with his
four-volume history of the science fiction magazines (1974-1978), Ashley’s
The Gernsback Days thus will forever constitute required reading for
historians and scholars of science fiction, and the academic science fiction
community should therefore consider itself very lucky to have had Mike Ashley
around.

As a critic, Damien Broderick likes lonely grandstands. His appreciation of
science fiction is at its sharpest when he has managed to find an unfrequented
part of the arena where he can cheer like crazy as if everyone else is missing
the real action. He is most exuberant when he has identified one overwhelming
metaphor: postmodernism in Reading by Starlight (1995), the singularity
in The Spike (2001), and the megatext all over the place. OK, sometimes
he makes such an elaborate show of his appreciation that we end up watching the
audience rather than the action, but at least it gives him something fresh and
iconoclastic to say, and he hits the target often enough for these extravagant
display rituals to be worth the entrance fee.

This new collection, however, feels as if he hasn’t wandered quite far enough
from the familiar. There are too many knowing references to the singularity, and
especially to the megatext, for it to be really fresh. We’ve heard these mighty
cheers before, and though he is, as ever, extraordinarily enthusiastic about the
work he likes and extraordinarily cutting about what he doesn’t, the effect is
strangely muted. Broderick isn’t doing his job if he doesn’t grab our lapels and
raise our hackles all at the same time, but here where, as the title suggests,
he is engaged in a rather pedestrian measuring out of the spatial and temporal
dimensions of science fiction, he does not outrage or excite anywhere near
enough.

Part of the problem lies in the structure of the book. It is made up largely
of reviews written for a variety of outlets ranging from The New York Review
of Science Fiction to Melbourne’s newspaper The Age. The range of
sources suggests that some of these reviews would have been long, others short,
some would have been written for a knowledgeable audience and others for a
general public who may have little or no interest in science fiction. But it is
impossible to tell which is which because the reviews have largely been clamped
together to form supposedly theme-driven “chapters” and, except curiously in the
case of the last two essays in the book, there is no indication of sources.
There is nothing overtly wrong with this technique, except that the coverage of
the different “themes” tends to be dictated more by the books he has happened to
review than the actual subject. Thus, while presumably exploring the “t” of
science fiction (which dimension is which is never made entirely clear), he has
a chapter on “dinosaurs,” the stars of the so-called Golden Age who have cast
such a long shadow over the genre. But the chapter is unbalanced. His comments
on Asimov and Heinlein cover weak and atypical works from the ends of their
careers: Asimov “plodding ... through the gooey itinerary” of Fantastic
Voyage II: Destination Brain (1987; 42), for instance, or Heinlein trying
“for the post of Voltaire of the vulgar” in Job: A Comedy of Justice
(1984; 59). These sorry late works make a suitable platform for Broderick to cry
out, in the impassioned way that makes us stand and cheer him: “Isn’t science
fiction the literature of change, of innovation, of shock and dislocation? How
can it be that seminal ideas 30 or even 60 years old continued [sic] to propel
books and their authors or surrogates to fame and wealth?” (43). Meanwhile,
presumably due to the exigencies of reviewing, he features a far broader and
more representative survey of Clarke’s career, lamenting his late sequelitis but
also and justly applauding his “climb into the unspeakable mysteries of the
heart of reason” (52), identified by Broderick as a feature of Clarke’s work
from Childhood’s End (1953) to The Fountains of Paradise (1979).

In another chapter that supposedly examines the ways in which science fiction
writers have dealt with matters of ontology, he begins with Ian Watson, moves on
to Philip K. Dick, takes an unconvincing side trip into Philip José Farmer’s
Riverworld series (1971-1983), then returns to Watson. It is typical of
Broderick to concentrate here on Watson, an unnervingly prolific writer who,
perhaps for that reason, has not generally had the critical attention he
deserves. When he describes Watson’s attack on Sufism—this is not my reading of
Watson, but then, one does not expect Broderick to endorse one’s familiar
perspectives—as “arabesqued from the outset with flaming darts of Chomskyan
linguistics, high-energy physics, advanced molecular biology, the cosmology of
black holes and Big Bang, all tied together in a nervy style replete with
recondite puns” (70), it is as if Broderick is writing about himself. What
Broderick does not say is that Watson, too, can be by turns exhilarating and
wearying. By contrast Dick, object of more critical examination than just about
anyone else in the genre, is passed over in less than a page, and Broderick does
not devote that much more to Farmer, before returning breathlessly to Watson.
“[T]o a far greater extent than Philip Dick was able to manage, Watson from the
outset blended the undergrowth of the human imagination with a fastidious
attention to complex intellectual nutrients,” Broderick admonishes us (74),
before name-checking Barthes and Chekhov, Tsiolkovsky and Jane Austen in yet
another encomium to the fecund bard. When one considers how little Watson, Dick,
and Farmer have in common, in either subject matter or approach, and when one
further considers how many significant science fiction writers who have dealt
interestingly with issues of ontology are not even mentioned here, this chapter
can be seen as a bundling together of disparate reviews rather than a serious
examination of an interesting topic. But then, that isn’t the point. Ontology
here is just a peg upon which to hang Broderick’s enthusiasm for Watson; Dick
and Farmer have been tucked into the mix to justify the subject rather than to
support it.

Some of these theme chapters are better than others. The two opening chapters,
an autobiographical laying out of his wares and an account of his encounter with
the “gaudy, erotic poetry” (32) of Samuel R. Delany, tend to set aside analysis
for straightforward enthusiasm, and are all the better for it. But even
Broderick can’t keep up the effort of finding the vague themes that can usefully
link short pieces together, so in the second half of the book the supposedly
thematic structure is abandoned and he simply presents a series of longer
reviews. Some of these are interesting, if typically idiosyncratic: reviews of
novels that have had, justified or not, little impact on the field such as Jamil
Nasir’s Distance Haze (2000), or which are just plain bad, such as Robert
Grossbach’s A Shortage of Engineers (2001), actually tell us very little
about the state of science fiction, or indeed about anything much except
Broderick’s individual and sometimes eccentric tastes and interests. I was,
however, very taken with his perspective on John Clute’s Appleseed
(2002), at least in part for the way he illuminates the novel by adopting
Clute’s clotted and often otiose use of language: “Science aspires to the
condition of deicide. Technology aspires to the condition of theogenesis.
Science fiction aspires to the condition of theophany” (188). All nonsense, of
course, but stirring stuff nonetheless. In fact, the two reviews that actually
manage to tell us most about science fiction have a more historical perspective:
Robert Silverberg’s Science Fiction 101 (originally published as
Worlds of Wonder, 1988) and an omnibus of three space-travel novels by A.E.
Van Vogt, Barry Malzberg, and Poul Anderson. It is as if these two reviews give
him the space and the excuse to simply talk about science fiction rather than to
expatiate upon its current state.

Going back to my running complaint about this book, that it is more the
result of happenstance than intent, I turn for further evidence to the index.
There you will find more references to Greg Egan than anybody else with the
exception of Brian Aldiss. Egan is clearly a touchstone for Broderick’s view of
science fiction, a key to measuring and perhaps even defining the “megatext.”
Yet not one of the pieces gathered here actually examines any of Egan’s work,
not even the essay on Australian science fiction that concludes the book. It is
as if the intended heart of this work has been somehow forgotten along the way.

All of which can be taken as suggesting that this is a disappointing book,
and certainly a flimsier work than one might have expected. Nevertheless, it
does not necessarily follow that this is a bad or even a negligible collection.
At his worst, Broderick is an irritating, self-indulgent, and self-referential
writer; at his best he is enthusiastic, vivid, and acute. And there are many
moments in this book when he is at his best. There is a superb chapter on
boundaries, looking at those writers, from Ray Bradbury and Ursula K. Le Guin to
M. John Harrison and John Crowley, who have trod the borderlands among science
fiction, fantasy, and mainstream. His analysis, that “[t]raditional literatures
tell us: this is how things are ... [sf] ... takes change in its stride ...
[while] ... mass-market fantasy tales retreat instead to a neverland” (94), is
precisely the sort of sweeping but vivid account we have come to expect from
Broderick. He covers so much in this chapter—Sterling, Gibson, and Jack Womack
rub shoulders with Victor Hugo, Arthur C. Clarke, and Greg Bear—that you long
for him to slow down, give us a little more depth to go with the breadth, expand
what he has to say. It is interesting, possibly important, but like so much else
in this book he takes it at a rush so you are left breathless, wondering,
impressed, but uncertain.

But of course Broderick wouldn’t be Broderick if he took it slowly. He raises
the hares, although somebody else may take on the more pedantic labor of chasing
them down. So when he’s on form he leaves you excited, eager to know more,
refreshed by his invigorating take-no-prisoners rush at the genre. When, in no
more than eight pages, he can take you from Hofstadter’s Metamagical Themas
(1985) to James Morrow to Martin Amis and Kingsley Amis, to Larry Niven and
Jerry Pournelle, and finally to Whitley Streiber, there are not many ways to
react except with a gasp. Later you may pause to wonder if this really did
amount to anything even remotely resembling a coherent idea, but at the time
you’re along for the ride and there’s no point in doing anything but whooping it
up and saying yes, this is the way to take science fiction, in one great,
cluttered, mind-scrambling dash.

The present volume contains seventeen papers, most of which were delivered at
a conference at the University of London in July 2000. The central theme is a
concept that the editor believes underlies Bulwer’s work, “a unifying coherence
[that] ... emerges particularly in repeated patterns of antitheses or
subversion” (9). This is not quite Hegelian, since the concept of synthesis is
less prominent than that of replacement.

Papers examine Bulwer’s major works in terms of social context, with, in
addition, two papers on Rosina, Bulwer’s estranged wife. Rosina, whose literary
life was devoted to attacking Bulwer in fiction, is studied more in terms of
women’s rights in Victorian England than in the usual approach of
psychopathology.

Two articles touch on Bulwer’s fantastic fiction. “Writing and Unwriting in
The Caxtons, ‘My Novel,’ and A Strange Story” by Christensen and “Bulwer Lytton
and Imperial Gothic: Defending the Empire in The Coming Race” by Lillian
Nayder. Christensen is concerned with the struggle between protagonist Fenwick’s
rationalism and the non-rational world, in terms of a magnum opus that Fenwick
is writing, and Nayder is mostly interested in the concept of colonialism and
American “manifest destiny.” Nayder brings in a comparison with Dracula
(1897) that is somewhat stretched.

Bulwer was the literary barometer of Victorian literature, though not a great
writer, and the present volume presents much interesting material. But since
only about a dozen pages are devoted to Bulwer’s fantastic fiction, the book is
of limited value to readers of SFS.

As an African-American who writes, reads, and critiques science-fiction and
fantasy from Xena to Gabrielle, and from Harry Potter
(1998) to Ghost in the Shell (1996), I am incredibly happy that Sandra
Grayson has published Visions of the Third Millennium. I agree with
Sheree Thomas’s call for more scholarship on African American science fiction in
her 2000 anthology, Dark Matter. Despite some recent contributions in
Extrapolation, Locus, and elsewhere, there is a lack of substantial
criticism on blacks in science fiction and fantasy, particularly in book form.
According to Ronald Dorris’s foreword, Sandra Grayson’s book might actually fill
that gap by articulating “the importance of black science fiction authors ... to
scholarship, to critiques of slavery, and to our lives today, tomorrow, and
forever” (x). Unfortunately, Grayson’s text does not reach these goals. While
Grayson shows how “writers of African descent ... use science fiction to analyze
race and gender, myth and language” (1), she does not follow through fully in
her logic. For instance, in her introduction she states she will “highlight
biographical information” about her authors to “provide an overview of linkages
between artists of African descent and science fiction” (5), but except for Nalo
Hopkinson, she does not explain connections between the included the birth dates
and educational backgrounds of her authors and their work. How exactly do
Burton’s scholarship at the University of Southern California and Steven
Barnes’s Hypnotherapist certificate from the Transformative Arts Institute
relate to science fiction? Although she successfully shows how these writers
re-imagine American slavery, Jim Crow law, and African myth, her analysis is
stinted by her heavy focus on Butler and her failure to fully compare these
neo-slave narratives, such as Octavia Butler’s Kindred (1979), to the
slave narratives they derive from, such as Harriet Jacobs’s Incidents in the
Life of a Slave Girl (1861).

The entire book is unbalanced. Chapters Two through Five of Visions all
discuss novels by Butler, including the Earthseed (1993 +), Patternist
(1976-1984) and Xenogenesis (1987-1989) series, as well as the historical
fantasy Kindred, leaving only three chapters of analysis on the other six
writers: Tananarive Due, Nalo Hopkinson, LeVar Burton, Samuel Delany, Steven
Barnes, and Charles Saunders. While Grayson successfully demonstrates how Butler
incorporates historical events and terminology from the African Diaspora.
including Kindred’s cookhouse community and Earthseed’s use of
Mande principles, in the first half of the book, she allots little space to the
remaining works. As a result, the depth of her analysis in Vision’s
second half is restricted to heavy summary or very brief discussion. In Chapter
Eight, “Envisioning Future, Contemplating Past: Journeys in Far Beyond the
Stars and Firedance,” she spends seven pages discussing Steven
Barnes’s Star Trek: Deep Space Nine novel, Far Beyond the Stars
(1998), but only four paragraphs discussing Firedance (1993). She nicely
links Firedance to the DS9 novel and points out Firedance’s
usage of African ideologies through the protagonist’s encounter with the Ibandi,
“an invented people” who “symbolize a return to” Africa (100). The rest of this
short discussion merely re-tells Knight’s Ibandi education, without relating
that education to the larger African tradition.

I also wish Grayson’s analysis had been deeper. Although the topic of duality
recurs in a majority of Butler’s novels, Grayson never fully discusses it or its
relation to early slave narratives in the African Diaspora. Considering how
nineteenth-century slave fiction used the mixed race/mulatto figure, such as
Sappho Clark in Pauline Hopkins’s Contending Forces (1900), to appeal to
multi-racial audiences, why do so many of the authors in Grayson’s
twentieth-century texts use hybrids, including Butler’s alien half-breed Lilith
in Xenogenesis and Due’s part-immortal, part-human character Jessica in
My Soul to Keep (1997)? Might Grayson imply through these writers that
the future will require the genetic or ideological mixing of multiple cultures
to survive? Also, how does the topic of family in Butler and Due (Olamina’s
dissolved relationship with her daughter, the immortal power Jessica shares with
her daughter) relate to the fractured African family of the Middle Passage?

This failure to probe more deeply in her analysis continues in Chapter Five,
“Past, Present, Future Intersections: An Exploration of Kindred,” where
she focuses on Kindred, Butler’s historical fantasy novel about Dana, a
modern-day African American woman transported to the antebellum South. Although
Grayson includes a list of “African American historical novels and films about
slavery” from “1853 to the present” (60), she does not thoroughly compare any of
these texts to Kindred. Grayson briefly compares Dana’s cookhouse
schoolhouse in Kindred to Harriet Jacobs’s own efforts to teach her
fellow slaves as discussed in her 1861 autobiography. Considering how Grayson
emphasizes Butler’s heavy research and use of slave narratives, it would have
been nice if Visions had compared Kindred to an actual slave
narrative more comprehensively. Did Butler recreate the rhetorical structure and
experiences of Jacobs and other slave women in Kindred? Also, what is the
difference between historical fantasy like Kindred and other neo-slave
narratives such as Toni Morrison’s Beloved (1988), since they both
speculatively re-imagine the slave experience?

Finally, Grayson does not thoroughly discuss the topic of gender until
Chapter Six, “Black Women and Activism in Novels by Tananarive Due, Nalo
Hopkinson, and LeVar Burton,” when she highlights how the “activism” of Due’s
characters “signifies a vision of Black women uninterrupted by notions of women
as passive and powerless” (73) and briefly mentions how Mami Gros-Jeanne’s
healing powers in Hopkinson’s Brown Girl in the Ring (1998) parallel
those of Butler’s Anyanwu in Wild Seed (7 [1980] ). Unfortunately, she
does not thoroughly compare Due’s, Hopkinson’s, Burton’s, and Saunders’s
characters to Butler’s female protagonists. Is there a reason that all these
writers use strong female characters of African descent? Does this reflect the
role of the African-American woman in contemporary society? If so, Grayson does
not fully explicate it.

If Grayson had selected a few novels rather than attempting to survey over
fifteen texts in 115 pages or if she had expanded her discussion of the five
writers to 300 pages, this would have been a more successful book. Perhaps she
could have focused on Butler alone, since Butler takes up half the text already.
Another rich area for exploration would have been how racial Othering can
transform a fictive text into science fiction, something that Sheree Thompson
briefly discusses in Dark Matters. Since Grayson focuses on the
“metaphorical and literal journeys” of her writers’ characters “through Africa”
(113), it would have been helpful if she referred to more African myths (actual
ones, not imagined ones) and if she (or her editor) had caught proofreading
mistakes such as “twenthieth century novels” (61) and “The Slave’s Narrative”
(120). I would have also liked to see her acknowledge some of the 66 articles
written on Butler from 1982 to 2001 and the 120 articles on Delany from 1970 to
2001 in the MLA database. Instead, she uses only three critical pieces on Delany
and Butler, two of which were published in the 1980s. Although Grayson shows how
these writers of African descent incorporate race into their narratives
throughout the body of this book, she doesn’t show why they use race beyond her
introduction. The four-paragraph conclusion of this 115-page book primarily
focuses on the novels’ sub-theme of social change. The final two sentences of
the final paragraph state that as long as the “color-line” continues “to plague
North America, ... science fiction writers of African descent” (115) continue to
write about it. But why is it so important to have African American writers
rewriting racial events? Why can’t other writers like Kathryn Kurtz or Diane
Duane tackle that task? As an African American in the science fiction and
fantasy community, I know what that answer is for me, but what is it for
Grayson?
Grayson has a strong teaching and publication background in African American
cinema and literature, as represented by her 2000 book Symbolizing the Past:
Reading Sankofa, Daughters of the Dust, and Eve's Bayou as Histories, and
her 2003 article “Black Women and American Slavery: Forms of Resistance,”
published in Sharpened Edge: Women of Color, Resistance, and Writing, but
this strong background is not evident in Visions. Grayson is
single-minded in showing how these writers incorporate the African Diaspora into
their texts but she neglects to demonstrate how the writers relate to one
another or to other African and African American writers. A discussion of
rhetorical strategies would have been another welcome addition. I hope my
discussion of the present volume’s weaknesses will inspire Grayson and other
scholars to further and deeper scholarship.

In their introduction to Cult Television, editors Sara Gwenllian-Jones
and Roberta E. Pearson note that “cult series usually—though not exclusively—
belong to one or another of the fantastic genres of science fiction, fantasy,
horror, or speculative fiction” (xii). This is appropriate enough, given that
defining “cult” seems almost as difficult as defining any of the categories of
the fantastic. After acknowledging that “‘cult’ is often loosely applied” to
television shows that meet one or more of a broad list of criteria—including
being “considered offbeat or edgy,” drawing “a niche audience,” and “having
nostalgic appeal” (ix), the editors offer a detailed discussion of the signal
qualities of cult television, which they summarize as “[s]eriality, textual
density, and, perhaps most especially, the nonlinearity of multiple time frames
and settings that create [a] potentially large metatext” (xvii). This last
quality is especially important with reference to what the editors and several
of the book’s contributors seem to regard as the key characteristic of cult
television: the degree to which it invites fan devotion in the form of both
promotion (web pages and other word-of-mouth) and participation (conventions,
fan fiction).

The editors caution, however, that meaningful discussion of cult television
must consider “the full circuit of communication, that is, texts,
production/distribution, and audiences, rather than ... an overvaluation of any
one or two of these three factors” (x). Citing an essay by Jimmie Reeves, Mark
Rodgers, and Michael Epstein, Gwenllian-Jones and Pearson note the importance to
cult television of the rise of cable and VCRs, and the increasing willingness of
television networks to be content with niche, rather than mass, audiences
(xii-xiii). They also contrast the relative commercial failure of Twin Peaks
(1990-1991), whose narrative was essentially dependent on a single murder
mystery, with the unquestioned success of The X-Files (1993-2002), which
offered fans both self-contained episodes and “an endlessly deferred resolution
to the overarching puzzle,” while exploring “a variety of subcultures and
subcultural discourses” (xv).

This broad scope of inquiry is reflected in the book’s twelve essays, which,
although divided evenly (four apiece) under the general headings of “Cult,”
“Fictions,” and “Fans,” offer a wide variety of perspectives even within their
respective categories. In the “Cult” section, Philippe Le Guern’s “Toward a
Constructivist Approach to Media Cults” (translated by Richard Crangle)
considers, from a more intensely theoretical perspective, many of the same
issues raised by the editors in their introduction, and concludes that the
concept of “cult” may be impossible to pin down: “to a certain extent ‘cult’ is
a social construct that constructs socially.... The question is therefore less
one of knowing what ‘cult’ is ... than one of bringing to light the uses that
are made of it” (19-20). Mark Jancovich and Nathan Hunt address issues of
description and definition in “The Mainstream, Distinction, and Cult TV” by
focusing on the degree to which “cult fandom ... draws on the terms and
strategies of legitimate culture” (28) and shares with the formal aesthetics of
“high” culture an opposition to “mainstream” aesthetics. Thus, “fandom and the
academy have always been deeply interconnected as fans try to legitimate
themselves in terms of the academy and new generations of academics establish
themselves through the act of aesthetic transgression” (41). Petra Kuppers
sounds a similar theme in her essay “Quality Science Fiction: Babylon 5’s
Metatextual Universe,” noting the degree to which B5 invokes the
standards of, and invites comparison to, “quality” literature, from the
invocation of the originary genius of “core creator” J. Michael Straczynski to
the presence of legendary writer Harlan Ellison as creative consultant to the
episodes themselves, in which “reflective references to layeredness, writing
process, and symbolism multiply and signal ‘privileged moments’ for the viewer
to store away and reflect on later” (42). Issues of quality also inform
co-editor Roberta E. Pearson’s essay “‘Bright Particular Star’: Patrick Stewart,
Jean-Luc Picard, and Cult Television,” which argues that actor Patrick Stewart
has avoided being solely defined by his role as Jean-Luc Picard on Star Trek:
The Next Generation (1987-1994), and has in fact enjoyed a successful post-Star
Trek career in a variety of roles. This success, according to Pearson, was
helped along by specific markers such as Stewart’s British accent, his
well-known experience as a Shakespearean actor, and his unconventional sex
appeal—at least two of which are arguably appeals to “quality.”

The first essay in the “Fictions” section, co-editor Gwenllian-Jones’s
“Virtual Reality and Cult Television,” discusses how cult television shows
create deeply immersive environments, “vast and/or dense with detail” and
“augmented by officially produced secondary texts” such as novelizations and
comics and “fan-produced tertiary texts” such as fan fiction (87). The author
then suggests that such shows can be categorized in four “broad narrative
formats”: “travelogue” (in which the protagonists are constantly moving from one
landscape to another; e.g., Xena: Warrior Princess [1995-2001]), “nodal”
(in which the action is largely confined to a single location; e.g., Babylon
5 [1993-1998]), “portal,” in which the characters travel from a fixed point
but return to it (e.g., Buffy the Vampire Slayer [1997-2001]), and
“combination” (e.g., the original Star Trek [1966-1971], which combined
travelogue and nodal, or The X-Files, which combined travelogue and
portal). David A. Black’s “Charactor; or, the Strange Case of Uma Peel,” like
Pearson’s essay on Patrick Stewart, considers the extraordinary degree to which
television conflates characters with the actors who portray them, focusing on
Avengers (1961-1991) fans’ near-unanimous hostility toward Uma Thurman’s
portrayal of Emma Peel in the film based on the television series (1998). Karen
Blackstein’s “Flexing Those Anthropological Muscles: X-Files, Cult TV,
and the Representation of Race and Ethnicity” and Mary Hammond’s “Monsters and
Metaphors: Buffy the Vampire Slayer and the Old World” are the only two
essays in the book to offer close readings of specific shows, with Blackstein
providing a detailed analysis of the successes and failures—more of the latter
than the former, the author argues—of The X-Files’ attempts to dramatize
issues of race, ethnicity, and otherness, and Hammond making an equally detailed
argument that Buffy chronicles a process of maturation from “a local,
endangered, but disengaged American adolescence” to “a globally aware and
morally forearmed but distinctly liberal young adulthood” (148).

The essays in the final section on “Fans” offer perhaps the greatest variety
of perspectives in the book. Alan McGee’s “How to Tell the Difference between
Production and Consumption: A Case Study in Dr. Who Fandom” rejects the
binary model stated in its title and, citing “the tendencies within fandom to
professionalism that stretch all the way up to the production of the broadcast
television programs themselves” (172), argues that “the distinction between the
cultural production of fans and that of television producers is not nearly so
distinct” as we might think (171). While McGee insists that fans are more
“producers” than they are given credit for, Toby Miller, in “Trainspotting
The Avengers,” rejects the idea of fan activity being in any way equal to
the creative and corporate control of the actual “producers” of the show and
argues further than the fans’ devotion “replicates the very forms of quality
discourse that were supposedly toppled by anti-canonical cultural studies”
(195). Jeffrey Sconce takes the issue of audience several steps further as he
describes, in “Star Trek, Heaven’s Gate, and Textual Transcendence,” how
the Heaven’s Gate cult, thirty-nine of whose members committed mass suicide in
1997, drew inspiration from Star Trek, and the degree to which this
tragic event is (or is not) a comment on the dangers of fan obsession. The book
concludes with Eva Vieth’s “A Kind of German Star Trek: Raumpatrouille
Orion and the Life of a Cult TV Series,” an overview of a German show that
debuted at the same time as Star Trek, ran for only seven episodes
(1966), but nonetheless managed to spawn a cult following, although one that at
present is rapidly aging and not showing signs of recruiting a “next
generation.”

Any collection that is more concerned with variety than consistency runs the
risk of satisfying nobody, and I cannot imagine the reader who would be equally
satisfied with all of the essays in Cult Television. The editors’ introduction
certainly contains many arguable points, such as their dismissal of
non-fantastic television from cult status, in part because of the questionable
assertion that only the television of the fantastic affords the opportunity for
“nonlinear narratives ... encompassing multiple time frames” (xii). This may be
a difference in definition; while I would cite The West Wing
(1999-present) as a television show that employs multiple time frames, the
editors insist on the fundamentally “linear structure” of that show and other
“realist” television shows. Nonetheless, it would have been interesting to have
included, if only for the sake of contrast, an essay on a realist television
show. (A Google search on the terms “CSI,” “fan,” and “fiction” produces about
168,000 hits, by the way.) There is also the ongoing argument as to which shows
merit discussion and which do not. I trust it’s not American provincialism that
leads me to question including two essays on The Avengers and none on
Twin Peaks, and not nostalgia alone that makes me wonder at the lack of even
a mention of Dark Shadows (1966-1971).

Although the book lacks an index, counting numbers of pages and references
would probably lead to the conclusion that, for all the variety of opinion and
perspective, there is at least one consensus among these dozen essays: when it
comes to cult television, there is Star Trek in its various incarnations,
The X-Files, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and maybe The Avengers,
and then there’s everything else. No coincidence, perhaps, that the essays on
Star Trek, X-Files, and Buffy were, to my mind, the most engaging and
convincing in the book, although I also greatly appreciated Toby Miller’s
admirably cranky Avengers essay and found Eva Vieth’s essay on the German
TV show Raumpatrouille Orion immensely interesting. Others will
undoubtedly find greater value in different selections. All in all, Cult
Television is a very useful book that is taking a serious topic—how
television shows work as both art and commerce—very seriously indeed. Since the
book was completed, a whole new round of “cult” tv shows have appeared in the US
alone: Firefly (2002), Deadwood (2004-present), and Lost
(2004-present) being the most prominent examples. I hope there will be more
books like Cult Television, because there is certainly much more to
discuss.

Although best-known as critic and biographer of H.P. Lovecraft—cf. H.P.
Lovecraft: A Life (1996)—S.T. Joshi’s engagement with the horror genre has
been extensive and profound. In addition to founding and editing Lovecraft
Studies (1986-present) and Studies in Weird Fiction (1986-present),
two of the premier small-press journals for the study of horror fiction, Joshi
has been active as a practical critic of the genre, reviewing current horror
novels and assaying the efforts of horror writers present and past. Perhaps
Joshi’s most significant achievement to that end has been a pair of overviews of
the horror field: The Weird Tale (1990), which considers the development
of horror through the work of a half-dozen late-nineteenth and early-twentieth
century foundational writers; and The Modern Weird Tale ( 2001), which
carries the concerns of the earlier volume into a consideration of the horror
narrative from roughly the mid-point of the twentieth century through to its
last decade. To these we might add his volume, Ramsey Campbell and Modern
Horror Fiction ( 2001), which expands Joshi’s ideas—first put forth in The
Modern Weird Tale—about the man he considers the greatest living horror
writer.

Joshi’s new book, The Evolution of the Weird Tale, is an adjunct to
these three volumes. The book collects essays on eighteen different writers
originally written for a variety of reasons—book reviews, introductions to story
collections, critical assessments—which have been revised for their publication
together. The volume is divided into four sections: “Some Americans of the
Golden Age;” “Some Englishmen of the Golden Age;” “H.P. Lovecraft and His
Influence;” and “Contemporaries.” The first two sections treat four writers
each, as does the third section; the fourth section addresses six writers. The
contents cover roughly a one-hundred-year span, from the final decades of the
nineteenth century to the closing decade of the twentieth. The book is organized
according to a rough historical division: as Joshi acknowledges, he accepts
Philip Van Doren Stern’s designation of the years from 1880-1940 as the Golden
Age of horror fiction. What has come since that sixty year span Joshi considers
a Silver Age, a period marked by an overall decline in the genre’s quality.

In the book’s introduction, Joshi identifies his debt to Lovecraft’s landmark
study, Supernatural Horror in Literature (1939), and attributes part of
his inspiration in writing this volume to a desire to expand discussion of some
of the writers Lovecraft was unable to treat at length. Hastening to add that he
is not concerned with those writers’ influence on Lovecraft, Joshi identifies
his purpose: it is part of a process of canon formation. His intent is to read
thoroughly the works of individual writers in order to arrive at an
understanding of their oeuvres, and then to judge those oeuvres in relation to
the larger body of horror fiction. Joshi makes no secret of the evaluative
intent of his work, though he acknowledges that there is room for disagreement
with his assessments; indeed, he points out that such disagreement may help to
engender further discussion.

The opening section, “Some Americans of the Golden Age,” features short
essays on W.C. Morrow, Robert Chambers, F. Marion Crawford, and Edward Lucas
White. Overall, this is the weakest section of the book, which is unfortunate,
given that it is the first: the essays tend too much toward the summary and the
tentative. The second section, “Some Englishmen of the Golden Age,” features
somewhat more substantial essays on Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch, Rudyard Kipling,
E.F. Benson, and L.P. Hartley. If the essays in this section tend toward
brevity, that is compensated for by the incisiveness of their observations.

With the book’s third section, “H.P. Lovecaft and His Influence,” Joshi at
last hits his stride, and the book picks up markedly. The section begins with
the book’s longest essay, “H.P. Lovecraft: The Fiction of Materialism,” which
offers a concise statement of Joshi’s views on Lovecraft. It is no exaggeration
to say that Lovecraft stands at the center of Joshi’s conception of the horror
story, both as theorist and practitioner. After Lovecraft, Joshi proceeds to
examine the relationship between Lovecraft and three of the writers most closely
associated with him: Frank Belknap Long, Robert Bloch, and Fritz Leiber. Joshi’s
discussion of Bloch and Lovecraft is one of the book’s high points; it is
far-ranging, subtle, and specific.

The book’s fourth section addresses Rod Serling, L.P. Davies, Les Daniels,
Dennis Etchison, David J. Schow, and Poppy Z. Brite. These essays bring the book
to a strong finish: one feels a real sense of engagement in this section, no
doubt because the writers Joshi considers are either still living or, in the
case of Serling, of continuing influence.

In many ways, The Evolution of the Weird Tale offers a good introduction
to Joshi’s critical concerns, and to the strengths and weaknesses of his
particular critical approach. On the one hand, the broad sweep of the volume
gives us a sense of the sheer number of writers who have tried their hands at
the horror story and the different approaches they have employed; the result of
this is to encourage our appreciation of horror as a varied, dynamic genre with
a long history and an intriguing present. Joshi’s typical approach to individual
writers—reading as much of their work as possible in order to understand the
writer’s preoccupations; relating that body of work to the larger body of horror
literature—is a traditional one; at its best, it conveys to the reader a strong
sense of a given writer. When his summary of a writer’s works is combined with
perceptive observations, Joshi’s approach encourages one to seek out that writer
and (re)read him or her; the essays on Kipling, Benson, Hartley, Bloch, Daniels,
and Schow are particularly strong examples of this. In the process of
considering specific writers, Joshi also provides fine discussion of individual
stories and novels: his treatments of several of Hartley’s ghost stories,
Bloch’s later Lovecraftian fiction, Serling’s short stories, Daniels’s vampire
novels, and Schow’s The Shaft (1990) all provide fine examples of his
critical abilities.

In addition, the essay on Lovecraft provides a solid introduction to Joshi’s
understanding of the writer. Taken as a whole, his essays on Lovecraft and those
writers he immediately influenced give a real sense of a community of writers
engaged in a common project; indeed, his discussion of H.P. Lovecraft and Robert
Bloch’s relationship sets the standard for any future considerations of this
topic. Lovecraft and his circle would make a fine subject for a much longer
study, one I hope Joshi will consider writing.

On the other hand, Joshi does tend to skimp on analysis more than one would
like. As we have seen, he is eminently capable of fine and perceptive readings,
but he tends to lapse into assertion at the expense of argument more than he
should. This is not a lapse, I think, that can be excused by an appeal to the
book’s evaluative intent; indeed, given such an intent, the necessity for
careful analysis is all the more pressing. A number of essays in this book began
as introductions to collections of stories by the individual writers, and though
Joshi’s introduction to this volume states that he has revised them for this
collection, the essays on Morrow, Chambers, White, and Quiller-Couch, in
particular, still have too much of the feel of introductions: too many of the
specific qualities that make each writer worth our time are passed over.

If there is an overarching criticism one might make about The Evolution of
the Weird Tale, it is that, when all is said and done, the book says
comparatively little about how the horror story has developed. It sounds strange
to say of a critic as forceful and opinionated as Joshi, but a number of the
essays are too tentative—especially when it comes to estimating the influence of
the writers he considers—and there is a certain hesitancy about the book as a
whole: a central argument about the development of the horror story never comes
into clear focus. Although a number of interesting possibilities are suggested
along the way, the book does not sufficiently fulfill the promise of its title
and bring us closer to understanding how the horror story has changed over the
last century or so. It would have been more accurate to call this book
Varieties of the Weird Tale.

Taken in that way, as an exploration of the various iterations of the horror
story we have seen over the last hundred-plus years, Joshi’s book is one of the
more stimulating volumes to have appeared in recent memory. The ambition of its
range is admirable. Joshi deserves credit for daring to raise his gaze to try to
take in the wider scope of horror fiction. Even the least successful of the
essays in the volume stir interest in the writers they address, while the most
successful may well spur revivals of the writers they describe. This volume may
do for other critics what Joshi credits Lovecraft’s Supernatural Horror in
Literature as having done for him: namely, inspire them to investigate the
writers it considers at still greater length and depth. If it does so, then its
effect will be considerable.